London<\/p>\n
People who have more traits of anxiety may be at increased risk of being bitten by a dog, a study has found.
\nResearchers from University of Liverpool in the UK surveyed 694 people in 385 households in a semi-rural town in Cheshire, England.<\/p>\n
They wanted to know how many people had been bitten by a dog; whether the bites needed treatment; and whether the victims knew the dog that had bitten<\/p>\n
them.<\/p>\n
Participants were additionally asked whether they owned a dog themselves.<\/p>\n
The researchers also assessed emotional stability using the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), which measures aspects of personality, including emotional<\/p>\n
stability and neuroticism, to see whether certain traits might have any bearing on the risk of being bitten.<\/p>\n
One in four respondents said they had been bitten before, with men almost twice as likely to have been bitten as women.<\/p>\n
People who owned several dogs were more than three times as likely to have been bitten as those who did not own dogs, and more than half of respondents<\/p>\n
said they had been bitten by a dog they did not know.<\/p>\n
Hospital records show the rate of dog bites is 740 per 100,000 of the population, but the survey responses indicate a rate of 1873 per 100,000\u2013nearly three<\/p>\n
times the official figure.<\/p>\n
One in three dog bites required treatment, but only a small proportion (0.6 per cent) required hospital admission.<\/p>\n
There also seemed to be a link between personality traits and the risk of being bitten, researchers said.<\/p>\n
The TIPI scores showed that that the more emotionally stable and less neurotic an individual was, the lower was their risk of being bitten by a dog.<\/p>\n
The researchers caution that this was an observational study so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, added to which only households in<\/p>\n
one county in England were included in the study, so the findings may not be applicable to the rest of the UK.<\/p>\n
Nor did they consider potentially influential factors such as sex, age, and breed of the biting dog.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough this was a small study, the findings are insightful and provide much improved indicators of the true burden of dog bites on public health,” said Carri<\/p>\n
Westgarth, a dog behaviour expert at University of Liverpool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
London People who have more traits of anxiety may be at increased risk of being bitten by a dog, a study has found. Researchers from University of Liverpool in the UK surveyed 694 people in 385 households in a semi-rural town in Cheshire, England. They wanted to know how many people had been bitten by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21021,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019\/revisions\/21021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}